Catching up with some of the most interesting indie games of 2014 (so far)

Many of the biggest video games to come out so far this year weren't even technically complete. In particular, Steam's "early access" designation has made bona fide alphas like DayZ some of the service's top sellers. How crazy is that? Back in my day, people bought video games when they were done, and we hiked five miles uphill (both ways!) in the snow to buy them at Babbage's, and we liked it that way!

Thankfully for us whiny old fogeys, 2014 has also already seen a few notable indies launch with a truly "finished" tag. Each of these titles has been in development for some time, with varying levels of hype surrounding the run-up to launch. Let's see how they each fare, post-beta.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch

Game Details

If annual gaming awards had a "best demo" category, Octodad: Dadliest Catch might have already wrapped its tentacles around the 2014 trophy.

The game seems insultingly simple at first glance, dropping players into a wedding and doling out tasks like opening doors, picking up wedding items, and walking down the aisle. There's one major catch: You're an octopus, squeezed into a businessman's suit. You control your "arms" and "legs" one at a time, either with a pair of joysticks or a mouse, and these tentacles are pretty loose and flingy. Thus, the sheer act of moving in Octodad is hilariously difficult by design.

The game makes the most of this hilarity. Reach for something on a desk and you'll knock everything else over. Walk around an average scene, and your arms will bump into stuff, maxing out the game's ragdoll physics system (and perhaps attracting unwelcome attention from bystanders). The developers even pepper the floor with banana peels, Saturday morning cartoon-style. The ridiculous premise is only enhanced by a nice mix of jokes, goofy scenarios, and objectives that aren't spoiled by flopping and flailing around. You do not enter Octodad with any hopes of precise control, and its early goings respect that fact.

But before long, the game's silly errands ask for a lot more precision, and that's where Octodad starts to sink. Whether you're walking and climbing over an awkward obstacle course, picking up and dropping giant floating balls in a puzzle, or even sneaking past anti-octopus scientists, you'll often end up spoiling your efforts with ill-timed falls, failed grabs, or worst of all "death" by way of getting caught in a sneaking situation.

The frustration doesn't have long to set in, though. Octodad is almost mercifully brief. As in, three hours, tops, even when accounting for frequent failures. At least those few hours are packed with cute and quirky dialogue from random passersby; a particular favorite comes from a man at an aquarium dressed like a hammerhead who doles out some of the most arcane fish trivia imaginable.

Still, the dialogue resembles Full House more than Portal—family friendly almost to a fault—and it particularly relies on the goofy conceit that the wife just doesn't understand what's weird about her husband. Worse than that is how the game's structure chokes the fun out of something as enjoyably ridiculous as making an octopus pretend to be a human.

But it's still a lovely demo. Let's leave it at that.

Nidhogg

Game Details

My boredom with 98 percent of fighting video games comes from what I like to call "quarter-circle fatigue." Namely, the genre relies on the kind of precision joystick wiggles that Street Fighter II invented in 1991 (or some variation on the same). The few games that skip the fireball and uppercut tropes still rely on the same zoomed-in, face-each-other, best-of-three smackdown format.

Thankfully, last year's oddball, seemingly razor-thin Divekickdid a lot to reinvent that trope (while simultaneously mocking it). That has opened the door for another wonderfully offbeat fighting-esque game, Nidhogg.

This game pits two fencers against each other in a retro 2D retro battleground. Each showdown sees the fighters angle for position with high, medium, and low swipes, along with the power to jump, slide, and even throw swords. Each of the game's moves and swipes feels smooth and easy to pull off, offering nice rock-paper-scissors-style countering opportunities, particularly the ability to time a perfect swipe and knock a sword from a foe.

Were that the whole thing, the game might read like a retro-styled take on late '90s cult classic Bushido Blade, which created a ton of tension with its one-hit-one-kill samurai combat. But each kill only takes a slight peel off Nidhogg's onion, as the winning attacker then becomes the "runner" and must burst, full-steam ahead, into the foe's territory. The foe, alternatively, waits a moment to come back to life a few paces backward, new sword in hand, to try to block the runner once again. Whoever claims the most recent kill enjoys runner status and thus moves the action in his or her direction toward the figurative end zone that finishes the match.

This running mechanic defines Nidhogg. It inspires mad dashes toward your desired end zone or antsy finger tapping as you wait to respawn. But the real strength of the game's back-and-forth battling—full of runs and jumps and holy-cow somersaults—is that it gives both sides so many ways to change the pace of battle organically. You can run through like a foolhardy Leeroy Jenkins, often with successful results, or try to dodge past your opponent rather than killing them outright, or hold back for staredowns where one fighter stands on a ledge, giving a figurative Matrix-style come-hither gesture. Those moments make a never-ending Ken-and-Ryu fireball-off look downright dated in comparison.

The battling is rounded out with a bold 8-bit style—heavily pixelated and quite bright, but never obtrusive or hard to read—and some perfectly thumping music that you may not even hear over the shouts of players and onlookers alike. Nidhogg's tournament options are much appreciated, offering brackets and variants to make sure a large crowd of friends can happily split into a series of one-on-one, run-and-kill matches.

A crowd of at least two is more or less required to play Nidhogg, though. The game's solo "quest" is thinner than its pixels, and its online modes suffer from so much lag that the "host" player is almost guaranteed to win every time. But that disappointment makes sense for such a twitchy game, and it explains why similar retro-styled "sports" games, like Samurai Gunn and Towerfall, have skipped online modes altogether. Round up the gang for this one, then prepare to lose your voice.

Soul Fjord

Game Details

I'm probably entering dangerous territory when I suggest that Kim Swift could become gaming's next John Romero. While she's not responsible for any Daikatana-level failures, cash-bleeding ventures, or certainly any advertisements with unnecessary use of the word "bitch," her game-design trajectory does have similarities to Doom's co-creator.

Swift did co-create Portal, one of the best-loved franchises the industry has ever seen, and a few years later, she struck out on her own to found a new design studio. Her output at Airtight Games thus far has proven decidedly low-key, and by starting 2014 off with the disappointing, Ouya-exclusive Soul Fjord, Swift might have rubber-stamped her fall from game-design grace.

An oddly paired rhythm roguelike, Soul Fjord puts you in the funky shoes of Magnus Jones, a viking who somehow emerged from the disco era and battles funkily themed baddies—Bootsy Collins-loving ogres, spiders whose bodies are made of disco balls—through randomly generated levels. The catch here is that to succeed, players must tap their attack, block, and dodge moves to the music's beat.

The gimmick sounds pretty great on paper, as a way to add spice to the been-there-done-that roguelike genre, but what might have felt cool in a super-early prototype falls flat in a full game. Concentrating on rhythm means the ebb and flow of combat feels as boring as playing Dance Dance Revolution with a standard handheld controller. Enemy attacks are heavily telegraphed so that you can block or dodge to the beat, and there's little enemy variety, so it's not hard to fall into a pattern. Line up to a baddie, wait to block, pull off a button-tap combo, win, repeat. Even giant bosses turn out similarly boring.

Some more exciting enemies, and perhaps some Diablo-level superpowers to match, could have elevated Soul Fjord. Instead, players are stuck with melee weapons whose only differences, other than varied stats, come from changes in the rhythmic button combos. The so-called "random" levels don't help much; they're wide-open spaces for these boring critters to run around, with occasional shopkeeps and treasure chests scattered about and little visual variety.

The game certainly isn't a looker, thanks to the underpowered Ouya console. Assets are low-res and have been messily zoomed all around. The Ouya's wonky, lag-laden controller doesn't do the rhythm action any favors, nor does Ouya's push for free-to-play by default. The game's main cash-grab comes by asking players to pay cash to "soulbind" their loot, but all that does is make players far too strong when they respawn back at the game's start.

At least the disco theme has been fulfilled with a really solid soundtrack, complete with dynamic blasts of sound when players get into combat. Still, that shouldn't be reason enough to bother with this free-to-play roguelike.